London-based GE Healthcare has about 6,500 employees in southeastern Wisconsin, including sites in Waukesha, Wauwatosa and Milwaukee. The cuts amount to about 1.5 percent of the unit’s local employee base.

“It’s a relatively small number of people but it’s a difficult action,” Kuhn said. “The layoffs are the result of the uncertainty of the economic environment, particularly in the United States and Europe.”

Most of the employees who will lose their jobs work in the company’s local factories performing assembly operations for GE Healthcare’s diagnostic imaging business, Kuhn said.

GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Co. General Electric Co. Latest from The Business Journals Spotlight: Economy ‘not impossible’GE to add 38 jobs at Lexington Lamp Plant GE to add 38 jobs at Lexington Lamp Plant Follow this company , based in Fairfield, Conn.